I know a teacher who thinks that casual conversation in the classroom is ok. He thinks that his students are his friends and they all have fun during class, going back and forth in witty repartee from English to French (he is a French teacher).
The classes often roll by in pleasant interaction, but every now and again darkness comes out of the mouth of one of the students. He begins to wonder – WAKE UP MR. FRENCH TEACHER: YOUR STUDENTS ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS – if his students are as nice as he wants to believe. He starts to get defeated when the few kids who are the culprits here say those things. Sometimes he wants to run out of the building and cry because he lost the power struggle with a few kids in his class with the result that his class is no longer his, because he trusted the wrong students.
He says that it is so ugly when it happens he doesn’t know what to do and until now I haven’t been unable to advise him on what to do about these dark insulting reactions from these students that seem to come out of nowhere and cause him to want to run out of the building.
All that I have been able to tell him up until now is to use the classroom rules, but by this time of year the kids are immune to them, especially Rule #2 which is the backbone of the Classroom Rules, and so now the problem is up again and that is why I am writing my new ideas out in this series of posts on CM.
THE REAL PROBLEM IN CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT IN THE TPRS/CI COMMUNITY IS THAT WE THINK OUR STUDENTS ARE OUR FRIENDS AND THAT WE CAN SPEAK ENGLISH WITH THEM AS A LITTLE BREAK AND IT IS THEN WHEN THE DARK COMMENTS COME OUT FROM THE NARC KIDS WHO ARE SPRINKLED AMONG OUR STUDENTS AND WHO HIDE SO WELL BUT HAVE NOTHING BUT OUR DESTRUCTION IN THEIR SITES AND THAT IS NOT AN OVERSTATEMENT.
(to be cont.)
